Abstract
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influence on European precipitation (Pcp) has been deeply analyzed. Most of the previous studies focus on the atmospheric response in wintertime during the peak of the ENSO episode, showing boreal summer a season with a marginal ENSO signal. Furthermore, the stationarity of the ENSO teleconnection with Europe has not been considered in many works, which could mask possible nonstationary impacts in other seasons like summer. In this research we find a strong influence of eastern Pacific-like ENSO on the leading variability mode of European summer Pcp, showing a dipole-like configuration and linking El Niño with drier(wetter) conditions in northern(southern) Europe. This relationship is not limited to the total cumulative Pcp, but also to the low and extreme Pcp. This impact on European rainfall is found from the 1960s to the 1990s, a 30 years-long period when the position of the extratropical northern jet stream, which acts as a waveguide, favors the teleconnection pathway to Europe. Strikingly, the ENSO events behind this teleconnection reach their peak in summer. However, we show that the resultant Pcp in Europe also depend on the ENSO characteristic of the previous seasons, which could be used for predictability purposes.
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Data availability
The datasets analysed during the current study are available in the E-OBS v22.0e (https://www.uerra.eu) and NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis dataset (Kalnay et al. 1996).
Code availability
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Acknowledgements
This research has been partially supported by EU H2020 project NextGEMS (https://nextgems-h2020.eu/), EC Grant Agreement number: 101003470. We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project UERRA (https://www.uerra.eu) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service, and the data providers in the ECA &D project (https://www.ecad.eu). All the calculations and plots were carried out using the R programming language (R Core Team 2021).
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This research has been partially supported by EU H2020 project NextGEMS (https://nextgems-h2020.eu/), EC Grant Agreement number: 101003470.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Maialen Martija-Díez, Jorge López-Parages, Belén Rodríguez-Fonseca and Teresa Losada. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Maialen Martija-Díez and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Martija-Díez, M., López-Parages, J., Rodríguez-Fonseca, B. et al. The stationarity of the ENSO teleconnection in European summer rainfall. Clim Dyn 61, 489–506 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06596-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06596-4